An interesting project appeared in Zürich / Switzerland. It is a platform on the web, where they sell every object in the public space as art to real people: hydrants, recycle bins, post boxes – even buildings or signs on the street… simply everything. Sold objects are marked on site with a sticker and on the website as well. The owner of the artifact and the price given is part of the sticker and also clearly visible on the website. The project and website has the natural name “alles ist kunst” (all is art). Don’t we now this already, that everything is art?
Mayhem! Alert! You definitively want to visit this website! It’s fun, got screaming colors and only Amiga/mod-Tunes from the chipmusic-scene on it, that will make you go smiiiiiile.
Mazemod is a internet-streaming-station for tracker music made with the amiga. The music collection is really good and general in a high quality. If you fall in love into special tracks or playlists, you can download them as .zip file. Almost all contents on Mazemod come with free licenses, like GPL and Creative Commons (exept the music, because every music creator decides about the licensing itself). I think the master behind the radio is Bozoo and also remarkable are the graphics from o+ro.
Scientists from University of Manchester and Dolby Canada in Vancouver have figured out a very simple method to capture textures and assign them with depth-information. You will need this to model rooms, walls or characters with specific height information, in order to set height-maps, depth-maps or albedo-maps. Capturing them was a time consuming task that had to be done by hand or that required special expensive equipment like laser-scanner. Now we got this:
If the video does not start correctly, move the slider somewhere in the middle of the video.
You just take pictures of the desired texture. One with flash, one without. Some post-processing on the colors (that differ by the color of the flashlight and specific shadows) result in the height map, we are ready to use. This technique should not give *that* accurate results, but at least it works perfectly, in relation to the cost. So, happy hacking and modeling! More details on Gizmodo and NewScientist.
If you are running low on inspiration than I have something for you. At O’Reilly there is an interview available with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the leading designers on the early Macintosh-range. This interview is not only written, but you can also listen to it as podcast, so check it out.
From the interview:
James Turner: Reading your book, it seems like the project management style for the Mac was very loose. How would you compare it to conventional project management approaches like Agile or Waterfall?
Andy Hertzfeld: I’m not sure; I don’t even know what Waterfall is. I have a pretty good idea of what Agile programming is and in a way that’s the technique we used by the Mac. But I think you know all conventional processes will make conventional products. The key thing–the key ingredient to me is the passion that developers put into their work–how much of themselves they invest in it, and I think that’s kind of orthogonal to a conventional development process. You can, you know the formal process can be whatever but the key ingredient is the passion and you know and the Mac team had passion in spades.
Lately I came across the trailer of this old british movie from 1965. Unfortunately I missed the screening of it, but it looks very interesting. Very unusual and crazy and it seems to open rooms for vintage and classic movies I never heard about before. I got the hint form the website of the Gebäude 9, where they have a very delicious movie series. Dig there, you maybe you will find something interesting.
Is this the future of programming? OpenCode lets you write Processing-code right in your browser. If you click the RUN-button and wait some seconds, an applet opens, that runs the code you have written. Ok, if you want to develop something in that way, you will spend hours of waiting for the applet to start. But the process of sending code through the browser to the webserver is exactly the same thing, that php and cgi does back in the days as a real innovation. The very root of all internet-applications and modern coding-languages we have today for the web. So think twice. Maybe the way of dealing with code is completely about to change.
As you can see, this is still in the alpha-version of OpenCode. But opportunities are good, that the design, approach and vision around the MIT Media Lab and Processing once again could have the power, to re-invent programming and computational design.
Paris just gave me this news. The documentary “Reformat the Planet” about the Blipfestival is online for one week. So take the chance to check out the movie!